Page:History of Bengali Language and Literature.djvu/859

 VI.] BENGALI LANGUAGE & LITERATURE. 817 in the iron grip of rhetoric, has yet strange off- shoots which, though humble, discover a strength not possessed by the great,—sufficient to assert the victory of nature over all the forces and appliances employed to thwart her. Some of the Kaviwalas, who were almost illiterate, composed songs in un- assuming and artless language, which charmed even the highly educated of this age of rigid classic taste by their simplicity. The Uma sangita, of which I have already spoken in a foregoing chapter, com- posed by writers of meagre education, discloses a style in which simple and elegant words produce, without any attempt at puns or alliteration, a far greater effect on the emotions than all the grand- iloquent phraseology at the command of a poetic master of rhetoric could do. Not only some of the Kaviwalas, but also Nidhu Babu, who was a man of light and leading, preferred simple words and a plainness of style which strikes us by its contrast. with the spirit of pedantry that guided contemporary writers. When Sanskrit metres were being so closely adopted in Bengali poems, and learned scholars were trying to place the art of writing poetry hopelessly out of reach of the common martals by imposing subtle rules on all forms of versification, Dagarathi Ray’s new school of doggerel, called Panchali, as- serted itself in bold defiance of all metrical rules,— rhyming being the only condition in their composi- tion. He certainly took his cue from the sort of verses made extempore by the Kaviwalas as sequel to their songs. The Bengali poetry of a very early age had been called Panchali. This was a period 103 How nature asserts herself.